Roberto Arlt - The Seven Madmen

An indistinct babble of voices rose from these men, slumped on benches or gathered around the tables, in between which strolled the con-men in their decent clothes — soft collars, grey waistcoats, seven-peso bowler hats. Some of them were just out of Azcuenaga gaol, and passed on messages they had been given by prisoners there; others were wearing tortoise-shell glasses to inspire confidence; each and everyone of them quickly scanned the place when they came in. They all talked in whispers, bought bottles of beer for their odd companions, and came and went several times in a quarter of an hour, as they were called out on some shady business or other. The boss of this establishment was a huge man with an ox’s head, green eyes, a bulbous nose and thin, tight lips.

Whenever he got angry, his bellowing immediately subdued his customers, who were all terrified of him. He controlled them with the threat of violence. If one of the criminals made more noise than was tacitly allowed, the owner would suddenly come over: the offender knew what was about to happen, but sat there waiting in silence until the giant started pounding on his skull with short sharp blows.

The rest of the bar would fall silent as the others enjoyed the punishment. The unfortunate victim was kicked out into the street, and the hubbub rose again, as fresh clouds of smoke wafted towards the glass front door.

Sometimes musicians found their way into this den, usually with a bandoneon and a guitar. As they tuned up, an expectant hush fell over the denizens of this aquatic world, and an imperceptible wave of sadness swept through the room.

As the plaintive strains of a lowlife tango rose from the instruments, all the crooks accompanied it with their rage and misfortunes. The silence was like a many-handed monster that raised a dome of sound over heads drooping on to marble tables. Who knows what their thoughts were! And that huge, terrible dome pierced all their hearts, amplifying the mournful sounds of the guitar and bandoneon until there was something sublime in a whore’s suffering, or in the oppressive boredom of prison when the inmate imagines his friends living life to the full on the outside.

At some point even the most fetid souls there, the most bestial of features, gave way to an unheard-of trembling — but this vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, and when the musicians passed round their cap, not a single hand stretched out to drop in a coin.

“That’s where I used to go,” Erdosain told his imaginary companion, “to confirm my anguish, to know for sure I was lost, and to think of my wife suffering alone at home because she had married someone so worthless. How often in a corner of that bar have I pictured her running away with some other man, while I was sinking lower and lower; and that hole was nothing but the foretaste of what was to happen to me later on. How often, looking at those poor wretches, have I thought to myself: perhaps one day I’ll be exactly the same? I don’t know how, but I’ve always felt I knew beforehand what was going to happen to me. I’ve never been wrong. Can you imagine? Then one day in that cavern I met Ergueta deep in thought. Yes, Ergueta. He was sitting alone at a table, and some of the newspaper boys were staring at him in amazement, although others must have thought he was simply a well-dressed thief.”

And Erdosain imagined that at this point the Cripple asked him:

“What, my husband was there too?”

“Yes, gnawing at the handle of his cane with that dog-catcher’s face of his, while a black man was busy caressing some young boy’s rear. But Ergueta didn’t notice anything going on around him. It was as if he was nailed to the floor of the cavern. He told me he was there waiting for a contact to give him a tip for the next race, but the truth is, it was as if he had suddenly felt lost and had come in there in the hope of finding some meaning to life. It may have been exactly that. Looking for a meaning to life in those crooks’ behaviour. That was when I found out he planned to marry a whore, and when I asked him about his pharmacy he told me he’d put someone from Pico in charge, because his intention was to come to Buenos Aires and gamble. I don’t know if you heard he was thrown out of one club for cheating. It was even said he was trying to pass off fake chips, but that was never proved. I first heard of you when I asked him about his fiancee, a young millionairess from Cachari who was madly in love with him:

“‘I broke that off a while back,’ he told me.

“‘Why?’

“‘I don’t know … I was fed up … bored.’

“I insisted:

“‘But why did you drop her?’

“A sour gleam shone in his eyes. He waved his hand to drive off the flies circling round his beer mug, and growled:

“‘How should I know? Because I was so bored … because I’m such a mug. And the poor girl really loved me. But what could I offer her? Anyway, all that’s water under the bridge …’”

“Ergueta said that?”

“Yes. His exact words were: ‘that’s all water under the bridge, because tomorrow I’m marrying someone else’.”

The train pulled out of Flores. Hunched in his seat, Erdosain recalled how he had studied the pharmacist’s face as a nervous muscular twitch lent it an evil look.

“And who are you marrying?”

Ergueta’s face turned white. As he leant his huge head forward towards Erdosain, his left eye winked, while the other one seemed to disassociate itself from the rest, holding back to observe the surprise that would soon render Erdosain speechless:

“I’m marrying the Harlot,” he said, lifting a face in which his eyes had now rolled back completely.

“I didn’t move,” Erdosain told me later.

The pharmacist had an expression of such ecstasy on his face that he looked like one of those saints in a popular lithograph kneeling with hands clasped to his chest in devotion.

Erdosain remembered that while this was going on, the black man who had been touching up the boy’s behind now placed the youngster’s hands on his private parts; a gaggle of newspaper vendors was engaged in a shouting match, and the giant bar owner was striding across the room with a plate of soup in one hand and a reddish stew in the other, ordered by two famished pick-pockets over in a corner.

And yet he was not really surprised by the decision. Ergueta had made this kind of desperate choice because he was one of those hysterics whose obsessions lend them a kind of slow-burning fury, a deep-down explosion they do not hear go off, but whose shock waves increase their sensitivity a hundred times. However, Erdosain put on a show of remaining completely calm and asked him:

“The Harlot … who is the Harlot?”

Blood rushed back to Ergueta’s face. His eyes began to sparkle.

“Who is she? … She’s an angel, Erdosain. In front of these eyes, my very own eyes, she tore up a 2,000-peso cheque a lover had given her. She gave her maid a pearl necklace worth 5,000 pesos. She gave the porter and his wife all her silverware. ‘I’ll enter your house naked,’ she told me.”

“But that’s all lies!” Erdosain imagined Hipólita saying to him.

“At the time, I believed him. And he went on:

“‘If you only knew all that woman has suffered. Once, after her seventh abortion, she was so desperate she went to throw herself out of the fourth-floor window of the clinic. All of a sudden … it’s incredible … but Jesus appeared to her on the balcony. He stretched out his arm and would not let her jump.’”

Ergueta was still smiling. All at once he put his hand in his pocket and handed Erdosain a photo.

The delicious creature was very appealing.

She was not smiling. The background contained a scattering of palm trees and ferns. She was sitting on a bench with her head slightly tilted as she read a magazine on her knee. With her legs crossed, this gave her dress a bell shape above the grassy lawn. Her hair was scraped back and piled high on her head, which made the moon of her forehead seem even broader and more luminous. Her eyebrows formed a slender arch above her fine nose, perfectly setting off her slightly slanting eyes in the delicate oval of her face.